In computer networking, a server is either a software, or one or series of computers that link other computers or electronic devices together, that they are often used for providing essential services across a network, either to private users inside a large organization via Intranet or to public users via the Internet. Many servers have dedicated functionality such as web servers, print servers, e-mail servers and database servers, while the hardware requirements for servers vary, depending on the server application. Nowadays, servers' duties to provide service to many users over a network lead to different requirements like fast network connections, fast CPU for data processing, and high I/O throughput.
Please refer to FIG. 1A, which is a schematic diagram showing a conventional server architecture. As shown in FIG. 1A, a server 1 is composed of: a server board 10 or a motherboard, disposed at the rear of a server chassis; three storage devices 11, such as hard drive, disposed in the front of the server chassis; and a vertically disposed middle plane 12; in which the middle plane 12 is configured with three hot-swappable connecters 13 for connecting the three storage devices 11, and is electrically connected to the server board 10 by a signal cable 14 for enabling power and data to be transmitted between the storage devices 11 and the server board 10. Since servers often run for long periods without interruption, making hardware reliability and durability extremely important, hardware redundancy in server architecture is widely used. Accordingly, it is common to have one server being configured with more than one server board while enabling such server boards to be modualized into hot-swappable modules that can be pulgged in and out of the server without powering off the same.
Nevertheless, for modularizing a plurality of server boards 10 in to a hot-swappable module, an additional middle plane 15 that is fitted with how-swap interfaces 16 for electrically coupling to the plural server boards 10 is required, as the shown in FIG. 1B. However, since the fan 17 in the server of FIG. 1B is usually being sandwiched between the two vertically disposed middle planes 12, 15, the air flow of the fan 17 is blocked thereby and thus the heat dissipating efficiency of the fan 17 can be affected severely.
Therefore, it is in need of a server architecture capable of enabling its server boards to be hot-swappable without compromizing its heat dissipating efficiency.